This chapter examines elements of French-language culture in Britain between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries which reveal the cross-Channel ties fostered by a shared language. It focuses on the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut (ANPB), part of a medieval historiographical tradition charting British history from its origins to the contemporary era, considering it alongside related texts such as Wace’s Brut and the Roman des Franceis of André de Coutances. Surviving in over fifty manuscripts, along with more than 200 copies in English translation, the ANPB influenced the development of English historical consciousness up to and beyond the time of John Milton. The shifting of borders throughout the Middle Ages means that the terms ’England’ and ’France’ need to be understood as more mobile than the modern nation states they designate. From the Norman Conquest in particular, the Channel became as much a conduit as a barrier to cultural and political cohesion. Through the French-language Brut tradition, the chapter considers how Britain’s history was contextualized for literate English society within the wider cross-Channel environment of Anglo-French cultural and political entanglements.

Chapter One studies how Rome figures in the murky processes by which individuals settled their relation to the world. In the process, it establishes something of the range of conditions under which medieval and early modern writers negotiated their own absorption into the matter of Rome. The chapter pursues at length medieval and early modern habits of attending not so much to the wonders of Rome, but rather to all that is most ordinary, obvious (in the word’s etymological reference to that which is encountered ‘in the way’), and ubiquitous in what Rome left in its wake when it relinquished its formal, administrative hold on the provinces of Britannia. These preoccupations open onto a wide span of time: from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventeenth century. The texts and problems that dominate the chapter range from Gildas andBede to Sir Thomas Browne in the late seventeenth century.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1136) changed the course of history writing for centuries. It newly provided the Britons with a substantial role in the insular past and inspired the writing and copying of several Brut chronicles. This chapter surveys the development of Brut chronicles in England, in terms of the incorporation of legendary British history into accounts of Anglo-Saxon and later English rulers. It then focuses on one Brut history, the Prose Brut – the most popular secular, vernacular text written in late medieval England – looking at this chronicle’s reshaping of Geoffrey’s Historia at the transfer from British to English power. An exploration of the role of Cadwallader in the Prose Brut provides a case study to consider some of the ways in which the chronicle reshaped this period in the past in its original Anglo-Norman version (the Oldest Version) and then in later versions, written in English. The Oldest Version reimagined the British, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman conquests, providing a distinctive account of Brutus’s foundation of Britain and describing William’s reign in positive terms. But most strikingly, the Oldest Version omitted Cadwallader – Geoffrey of Monmouth’s last British king – from its narrative of the past. However, many English Prose Bruts added the famous ruler back into the historical record. Their distinctive account of Cadwallader’s reign shows some of the ways in which medieval writers reflected on moments of conquest and on the transitions between peoples in this history. Brut texts and manuscripts are ripe for further critical study.

In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and in the civic chronicles of the fifteenth century, London serves a symbolic role as the site of consent between the rulers of England and their citizens. This meant that with each new set of rulers, the myth of London’s importance had to be recovered and reestablished. Thus works such as Wace’s Brut and the anonymous Middle English Saint Erkenwald suggest a dialectic between London’s discontinuous history and its continuous connection to the present. London’s symbolic role also meant that even local histories such as the Middle English civic chronicles often conceal the complexity of local politics in order to present a simpler national narrative.

This chapter looks at the popular medieval historical genre of genealogy in both theory and practice. First it provides an overview of the divergent theories of and attitudes toward genealogy that inform medieval thinking. The significance of genealogy makes itself known in all arenas of medieval culture, from the political to the pious: for example, issues of lineage, succession, and inheritance were crucial to the structure of feudal society, while the biblical tradition of listing lines of prophets facilitated an unbroken genealogical narrative from Creation to the Christian era, reinforcing allegorical readings of salvation history. The main focus of this chapter will be on how genealogy shapes the writing of history. Nationalising histories from Geoffrey of Monmouth through Mannyng’s Chronicle, chronicles of noble families, and the royal genealogical rolls popular during the Wars of the Roses all share certain aims: to assimilate and lay claim to the legendary past as a way of authorizing the present, to shape particular views of national history, and to explore questions of nobility and prestige, often to propagandistic ends. The chapter also considers genealogy in practice as a material genre, looking at how visual genealogies such as pedigrees and genealogical rolls, both largely diagrammatic forms, present their information and ideological claims. Finally, the chapter aims to provide an overview of the uses and abuses of genealogy in medieval England with a broad historical spread.

This concluding chapter ‘History in Print from Caxton to 1543’ examines the various forms in which historical writing was represented in early print. It begins by considering William Caxton’s various contributions and their places in his larger publishing strategies. It examines those works that he published that reflect earlier, manuscript traditions of historical writing, including the prose Brut and the Polychronicon, and the ways in which these were modified as they developed a new print tradition. The chapter goes on to assess the emergence of new forms of history that began to be developed by print in the early sixteenth century, including the emergence of print as a means for swift response to contemporary events and finally the appearance, in 1543, the first appearance in print of John Hardyng’s fifteenth-century verse chronicle, the publication of which was combined with contemporary prose historical writings.